By Daniel Avshalom, VP Media at Zoomd
With the FIFA World Cup less than six months away, are your advertising and marketing plans set?
If not, no worries. Having run advertising campaigns during multiple FIFA World Cup tournaments, as well as during EUROs, the quadrennial European soccer championships, here are some advertising best practices to enhance campaign performance during FIFA 2026.
Celebrate national spirit and culture
Effective creative for ad campaigns running during FIFA tournaments should tie into the teams and the country. This can include images of players on the national teams, and/or cultural elements tied to the particular countries. Though some of the most successful campaigns from a performance marketing perspective were centered on national team players, we’ve seen successful campaigns tied to culture. For example, beer, wine, and food marketers who tie their campaigns to the countries of origin. Even if you don’t market a product or service with a country of origin, like Italian pasta or German beer, that doesn’t mean that you can’t use country-specific symbols in your ad creative.
People like to support their teams, which are usually their birth countries. In the US, that will mean Team USA, but fans will also support teams for which they share ethnic history. Expect Americans of Italian, English, French, Spanish, Mexican, and many other heritage countries to also support those teams, particularly if Team USA gets eliminated.
Thanks to Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), marketers can insert live scores and recent plays into their ads instead of static flag images. From experience, generic images result in a Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) that is 20-30% lower, particularly in a crowded ad auction. DCO will be particularly effective if many favorite teams are eliminated early, forcing marketers to scrap prepared ad creative.
Focus on the early games
Though the ratings and viewership will be highest during the last 10 days of the tournament, our best-performing campaigns have started two weeks before the tournament, running through the opening (Group) stages. With many more teams active, it’s easier to run campaigns tied to any national team. Though we don’t know for certain which teams will advance, as every FIFA tournament has a few major upsets, we’ll know soon which 48 teams (16 more than during FIFA 2022) will be playing in the opening rounds. Furthermore, the costs for advertising during the later games will be 3-5x higher, but the ratings/engagement rates in the later stages don’t justify the costs, reducing ROAS. That’s why running campaigns early in the tournament will optimize campaign performance and lower your cost-based Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Though we’ve run multiple campaigns through the FIFA finals, our strongest results were during the early stages of the tournament.
Go broad with your advertising channels
Many marketers will run ads during TV broadcasts of the FIFA games, and TV is a great media channel, particularly for live sports events. But there are more cost-effective channels to reach prospective customers with your marketing budgets.
With most fans watching TV with their phones open and engaged, particularly during live events like a FIFA soccer match, mobile is a great second screen for your FIFA marketing campaigns. In fact, throughout the tournament, mobile platforms and the open mobile web are successful channels for achieving your campaign KPIs. For EURO 2020, we achieved the best user acquisition results on the open mobile web, which exceeded all of the platforms used in the campaign. Among the platforms, Snapchat delivered the best performance, ahead of other larger and better-known platforms. That’s why for FIFA 2026, it’s essential to go broad and put aside preconceived notions regarding which platforms and channels will deliver the best KPIs.
FIFA 2026 matches are being played in 26 host cities in Canada, Mexico, and the US. If your products or services are sold locally in these cities and/or if you have a local marketing organization, it’s worth considering local marketing events and activities, too. Specifically, increasing bids within a 5-mile radius of host stadiums two hours before kick-off with shareable ad creative will result in an at-event social sharing surge.
It’s a game
If there is one thing that is critical for FIFA 2026 ad creative, it is to remember that it’s a game. Have fun and gamify your advertising. Creating a competition is a great way to increase ad engagement. Specifically, ‘Predict next goal and win…’ challenges resulted in a 15-25% lift in ad conversions vs. a generic tournament bracket challenge like the NCAA March Madness Bracket Challenge.
If you’re unsure how to gamify your FIFA 2026 marketing, it’s worth engaging with relevant creators who’ll suggest ideas based on their communities. This will also provide a built-in community that’s likely to participate in your gamified marketing campaign because they already follow the creator and engage with their content.
Another good place to start, particularly if you’re already working with the platform, is TikTok. The company’s selection as the ‘Preferred Platform’ for FIFA through the end of 2026 will provide exclusive opportunities for live streaming and posting curated content.
Leverage culture
With teams from 48 countries playing matches in 26 cities across three countries, there will be a lot of culture around FIFA 26. Whether you tap into national culture, sports culture, or soccer culture, there will be a lot of opportunities to tie culture to your marketing campaign and creative without offending anyone. People are passionate about FIFA, so make sure your marketing taps into this passion in a positive and inclusive way without disparaging any team, country, or player.
Finally, like with any sports tournament, there will be real-time marketing opportunities when something exceptional happens. Make sure your team is agile, following the tournament in real-time, ready to create standout marketing opportunities.
Regardless of the size of your marketing budget, even without being an official sponsor, there are lots of opportunities to tap into the energy and excitement of FIFA 2026 to power your marketing this summer.
